Our Notes & References

First edition, first issue, of this celebrated collection of poetry, the second by the future Nobel Prize winner – and the first one prepared by himself and with his consent.

Boldly inscribed by Brodsky to Sam Yossman (1946-2023), a Jewish émigré journalist and writer who worked for the BBC Russian service for 20 years, broadcasting under the name Sam Jones. He interviewed many leading figures and was “known throughout the Soviet Union for his rock music program on the Russian service called ‘Babushkin Sunduk’, or Grandma’s Hope Chest, still remembered by millions in the former USSR” (Lithuanian Jewish Community).

In 1964, Joseph Brodsky (1940-96) was sentenced to five years at a hard labour camp for “social parasitism”. His trial gained international attention and members of both the Russian and international intelligentsia, including Anna Akhmatova, appealed for his liberation. As a result, he returned to his native Leningrad in 1965 to discover that his first poetry collection, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy [Verses and Poems], had been issued that same year in the US without his participation by Inter-Language Literary Associates, gathering some of his earlier samizdat publications.

One of Brodsky’s main bibliographers, Lev Losev, recounts that the poet was disappointed with the collection because its editors included his “juvenilia” works from 1957-61 and overlooked numerous mistakes. In 1965-67, he actively worked on the preparation of a new collection of his works, our Ostanovka v pustyne. As opposed to the earlier edition, he himself selected all the poems, their sequence and division into six parts, each with its own title. Brodsky added twenty-three poems from the previous collection, four translations from John Donne, and his works written between 1965 and 1969 — these latter poems were never published before and constitute “more than two thirds of the book” (Losev, our translation here and below).

Losev states that Brodsky gave the manuscript to an American professor, George Kline, in Leningrad in June 1968: “This was a dangerous venture both for Kline, who smuggled the manuscript out, and even more so for Brodsky. After the recent trial of [writers Andrei] Siniavskii and [Iurii] Daniel, the very phrase ‘transferring manuscripts to the West’ already sounded like ‘espionage’ or ‘treason against the motherland’ […] Brodsky, however was determined to venture in this project.”

The edition was delayed into 1970 until the receipt of Brodsky’s most recent poem, “Gorbunov i Gorchakov” [“Gorbunov and Gorchakov”], which was inspired by his experience in a Soviet psychiatric prison and became one of the highlights of the collection.

The collection was published in New York by Izdatelstvo imeni Chekhova [Chekhov publishing house], a revival of the famous Russian emigré publisher of the 1950s. Brodsky’s poetry collection was among the first books to be issued by this new publishing house and was edited by the Columbia University professor and translator Max Hayward together with George Kline. In his memoirs about this publication, Kline claims that they decided not to indicate their names in the edition because the KGB had already taken note of Kline, particularly for his connection with Brodsky. The author of the preface, Evgenii Naiman (1935-2021), a poet, essayist, and Brodsky’s lifelong friend, also remained anonymous, signing his name as “N.N.”

In the New York newspaper Novoe Russkoe Slovo [New Russian Word] of July 7, 1970, the writer Argus (Mikhail Aizenshtadt) “hailed the book as evidence of the resistance of the young intelligentsia against the Soviet regime” (Losev). Two years after the collection’s publication, Brodsky was forced to leave Russia and moved to the US. In 1987, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature and is now considered the most important Russian poet of the second half of the 20th century.

Provenance

Sam Yossman (inscription by the author dated 3 August1976, in blue pen on the half-title; acquired directly from Yossman’s estate).

Bibliography

Lev Losev, Iosif Brodskii. Opyt literaturnoi biografii. ZhZL, Moskva, Molodaia gvardiia, 2006; Valerii Shubinskii, “Proshchaniie s normoi”, Polka academy, 2020; Olga Glazuniva, “Razvedchiki i predateli: Ob esse “Kollektsionnyi ekzempliar” Iosifa Brodskogo”, Neva, 5/2020, pp. 189-204.